How my head works

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By Leah May

Trying to ground myself has recently become a very hard thing to do.

I so easily get sucked into things

The worst thing is coming out of a cinema after watching a film for hours, familiarising and immersing myself into the world of that film. Then when I leave I see unfamiliar faces of my friends and a strange world. I get so easily sucked into things. So film watching really isn’t something I can do without it having quite a big impact on how I am for the rest of the day, possibly for longer.

My friends like to laugh about me never watching any films and I laugh along with them. I write down films that I’m going to never watch because I know it will damage me. The strange feeling of hope always appears just after watching a film. I have this sudden thought that I might be in a completely different universe where I can finally be happy. Getting myself out of that mindset is very hard.

What grounds me

Baths are something that help to ground me. The feeling of the hot water stinging at every pore in my body brings me down from whatever comet I’ve been floating on. It puts my eyes back in my head, instead of five feet behind me, and my voice in my throat instead of playing on a record in some body that isn’t mine.

The warmth gives me calmness instead of anxiety. Bubbles float in the water like my brain floats in my head, each drip from the tap a thought leaking into a careless stream of water. I spend hours tracing the patterns on the walls with my fingers. I let the water go cold around me as I trace intricate shapes with pretty colours from memories that seem much clearer than the actual now.

Memories

Memories are painted in blues, oranges, whites, reds, greens, purples, yellows, pinks and every colour in between, whilst now is a grey brown black smudge on a huge canvas. The outlines of the memories are clear, each shape sharp, corners pricking, edges gliding, circles sliding; the now memories are smudged at each corner, each memory fading into one another like a beautiful tragedy. What happened a year ago? I can’t tell if it’s the brown blob or the grey fingermark. Happy memories in yellows and oranges, outlined in white with green specs and pink stripes. Sad memories in deep navies, rich purples, dark crimsons, but still clear. These date back too far – my now memories consist of the past 5 years of my life gone by in a blur.

My head’s a canvas and I feel bad for painting – each memory I make feels wrong, like I shouldn’t be making memories, just wallowing in self-pity about myself, but I continue to make these blurry blind smudges. I make them to make myself happier, and my friends, even though it breaks me inside.